


Finding

by perissologist



Category: Batman (Comics), DCU (Comics), Nightwing (Comics)
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Past Sexual Assault, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-11
Updated: 2019-08-11
Packaged: 2020-08-19 04:34:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 18,855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20203798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perissologist/pseuds/perissologist
Summary: When Jason was Robin, he only saw Dick Grayson as the perfect asshole who put all the other sidekicks to shame, the golden boy who could do no wrong. And then he came back, and he was so broken that Dick, the Bat’s chosen heir, seemed mockingly whole in comparison. But now he’s an adult, with his own team and operations and purpose, and Dick isn’t the untouchable idol, too high for him to reach and too good for him to tarnish. Dick is a teenager getting drunk alone in a bar—which makes Jason the stable one.Which is an unsettling a realization as Jason’s ever had.---When the Ric Grayson situation reaches critical mass, Tim sends Jason back in time to piece Dick's memories back together.





	1. Part I

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pentapus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pentapus/gifts).

_ Six Months Ago _

Tim calls Jason at four in the afternoon Hong Kong time, no-longer-night-but-not-yet-dawn in Gotham. Jason ignores the first three dials and picks up on the fourth. 

“I told you not to call me here.”

“I know,” Tim says. Immediately, Jason knows something’s wrong. Tim’s voice is rough and uneven, like he’s been shouting. “It’s important.”

“Bruce made it pretty clear I’m not welcome in Gotham anymore, whether it’s ‘important’ or not, so if you wouldn’t mind fucking off—”

“It’s not Bruce.” Tim doesn’t rise to the bait. “It’s Dick.”

The sheer irony of that statement swells in Jason’s chest. He barks out a laugh. “What’s the fucking difference, Drake?”

“He’s been shot.”

“And?”

“He—” Tim’s voice catches. “He’s been shot in the head. The bullet fractured his skull and damaged part of his temporal lobe. The doctors don’t know when he’ll wake up. If he’ll wake up.”

For a moment, Jason just stares blankly at the opposite wall. Then he stands, walks away from the weapons he’s been cleaning at the kitchen table, and braces himself against the counter. The only coherent thought he can conjure up is that he doesn’t know why he’s so shocked. It was only a matter of time, before something like this happened. This isn’t even the first time Dick has been shot in the head. This isn’t even the first time Dick has  _ died. _

“And…Jason,” Tim says. Jason doesn’t know how he didn’t notice it before, how helpless Tim sounds. “They don’t know how much of him is going to be left if he does.” 

Jason bows his head. He draws in a steadying breath and does not think about the last time he saw Dick: At the edge of Gotham’s boundary, in the lashing rain, only ice and venom between them. “What do you want from me, Tim?”

There’s a long moment of silence from the other end. “I thought you’d want to come. Say goodbye.”

Jason closes his eyes.  _ You shot him! _ Dick screamed, that night, as the storm broke with shattering force over Gotham.  _ You shot Cobblepot in the eye, on national television. What’s Bruce supposed to do? What am  _ I _ supposed to do? _

They were almost there, before that night. After years of dancing around each other, Dick was almost ready; they were  _ both _ almost ready. Jason almost had him. 

And then Jason shot Penguin on a live broadcast. And then Batman kicked Red Hood out of his city. And then it was all gone.

The plastic of the phone creaks in the vice of Jason’s grip. “Call me if he wakes up,” he says. “Or if he dies.”

“Jason—”

He hangs up. 

_ Two Months Ago _

Jason’s first stop upon returning to Gotham after three months is a dive bar in the Narrows, where the beer is almost as cheap as the trouble. The smoke in the air is so thick it blurs edges and corners together, but even then, he doesn’t have any trouble making out the slim figure bent over the pool table, thin frame hidden under baggy, oversized sweats, shorn head covered by a beanie. Jason arms himself with a beer and makes his way over to the game, keeping to the shadows along the wall.

“Yuk it up, Grayson,” a lofty, heavyset man in a pinstriped shirt is saying, voice sour. “I’ll win that fifty back offa you, just you wait.”

The player in the beanie throws a grin over his shoulder, and Jason feels something catch in his chest. Despite the lost weight and shabby clothing, the elegant features and starburst eyes are unmistakable. Jason stands against the wall, watching the game over the big man’s shoulder. Dick practically looks straight at him and sees nothing. 

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that, Fred.” Dick delivers his shot, the cue darting forward in his hand with lightning speed and precision. Three balls roll into three different pockets: First the striped eleven, then the fourteen, and then the eight-ball, dropping neatly into the pocket in the far right corner. The spectators around the table crow uproariously; Fred growls out a curse, throws a bill in Dick’s direction, and stomps off, presumably to make more effective investments at the bar.

Jason waits until Dick’s admirers have dissipated, still hooting back congratulations, before approaching. Dick’s eyes flick up at him as he counts the modest stack of bills in his hands. The corner of his mouth curls up, friendly. “Evening, stranger.”

The greeting is familiar enough; at least, the playfulness is. But there’s no recognition in Dick’s eyes, no tension in his posture or questioning in his gaze. Dick is utterly relaxed looking back at him, an open book. Either he’s so deep undercover that he won’t even acknowledge Jason, or… 

Or Tim was right. 

Jason swallows. He casts around for a distraction and finds one in the pool table. “You’re pretty good at that. Better than anyone else here, seems like.”

Dick shrugs. “It’s just a game.”

“I meant the hustling,” Jason says, because he knows it’d make Dick chuckle. 

It does. But then Dick folds the bills away and offers a hand and says, like he doesn’t have a care in the world, “I’m Ric”—and something in Jason freezes, goes hard and cold with dread.

He clears his throat, takes the hand. “Jason.”

“Nice to meetcha, Jason.” Dick nods at the beer in Jason’s hand. “Can I buy you another one of those? I’ve got a little extra cash to blow tonight.”

“Sure,” Jason says. His mouth is still too dry. “Lead the way.”

Dick refers to the bartender by name, ordering cheap whiskey for himself and “another round of whatever he’s having for my new friend.” He toasts Jason when they’ve both got a drink in hand, eyes twinkling. “To the game,” he says, jovial.

“To easy targets,” Jason returns. Dick laughs, exposing the long line of his throat, and downs half of his drink in one swallow. His hoodie, zipped too low, exposes the stark line of his collarbone, the narrow plane of his chest.

“You new in town, Jason?” 

Jason lifts his gaze. He finds Dick taking him in from top to bottom, appraising him. “Why do you ask?”

Dick shrugs, and there—there’s a keenness to his eyes, that hyperintuitive people-sense that not even a bullet to the brain can suppress. “You seem like you’re not quite settled, somehow. Figured it might be the jumpiness of someone new to Gotham.”

“It’s not an easy city to adjust to,” Jason agrees. “But no, I’m a local. Though I’ve been away for a while.”

“Yeah? What brings you back?”

Jason swallows, takes in Dick’s cocked head and empty eyes. “Unfinished business,” he says, and takes a swig of his own drink. “What about you?”

“Me?”

“You new to this shithole?”

Dick’s eyes go distant. He hesitates, then shrugs again, reaching up to adjust his beanie in a nervous gesture. “In a way.”

“And that means…?”

“I’m a native, too,” Dick says. “But I got in a…an accident, a while back. Don’t remember much from my life before it. So I guess I’m not new to the city so much as the city is new to me.”

Jason widens his eyes, grimaces. The picture of casual sympathy. “At least you’ve still got your people, don’t you? That doesn’t change.” 

Dick smiles a little, tight. “They’re looking for the person I was,” he says. “That person doesn’t exist anymore.”

Something twists in Jason’s chest, just left of his ribcage. “Who took his place?”

The smile slips off Dick’s face. He looks at Jason as if seeing him for the first time. “I don’t know,” he says, finally, honest for the first time that night.

It hurts in a way Jason didn’t expect, to hear Dick talk about himself like he’s alone, unable to tell even a stranger in a bar who he is with any certainty. For as long as Jason’s known him, Dick has always been sure of who he is, his purpose in life. Above his joy, above his anger, above even his compassion and morality, a Dick Grayson without  _ purpose _ is not Dick Grayson. At least, not the one Jason knows.

Dick’s lips twist. His expression darkens. “I knew it,” he says. He pushes himself off the bar stool, stumbles back and away. “You’re one of them, aren’t you? The fucking  _ Bats _ .”

Jason puffs briefly with indignation, but Dick looks so betrayed that he deflates immediately after. He sighs, resists the urge to fist a hand in his hair. “Dick—”

Dick’s entire face changes, morphing from hurt to anger in a blink. “It’s  _ Ric, _ ” he snarls. “Not that it’s any of your concern. Or any of your crew’s.”

Jason’s jaw clenches. He knows Dick has a talent for running from the people who want to help him, but this is something else altogether. Dick is practically trembling, eyes bright with anger, teeth bared in a snarl. Looking at him feels like looking at an animal in a trap, ready to chew its own leg off. “They just want to help you,” he grits out.

“I don’t  _ want _ their help,” Dick snaps. “And I don’t need it. So tell your people that the next person they send after me is getting a pool cue through the eye.”

Dick turns, shoulders up to his ears, toward the exit. “Grayson,” Jason growls out. “They’re not my people. They’re yours.”

Dick doesn’t turn back, but he glances over his shoulder, just enough for Jason to catch the flash of blue through the smoke. “They’re  _ his _ ,” Dick hisses. “And he’s dead.”

Then he’s gone, out of the bar and into the night, a wounded animal dragging itself into the forest.

Jason emerges some time later, when he’s swallowed enough bourbon to drown out most of his nerve endings. The night air is cool and sharp against his face, cutting through his alcohol-induced haze just enough for it to hurt. He lists into the alley next to the bar and braces himself against the wall, the rough brick scraping against his palms.

The comm at his belt chirps, insistent. Jason groans, snatches it off, and presses it against his ear. “ _ What _ .”

“You saw him?”

“Yeah, Drake, I fucking  _ saw _ him.”

“And?” Tim asks.

“And he’s  _ gone _ , Tim.” Jases closes his eyes, breaths against the roiling nausea. “Whoever that was back there, that wasn’t Dick Grayson.”

Tim huffs, as if Jason is being a minor inconvenience. “Jason, come on, there must have been something—”

“Tim, listen to me. Dick is gone. Dead. We’re not getting him back.” 

Silence, vast and weighted. When Tim speaks again, it’s quiet, verging on anger. “You’re wrong, Jason,” he says. “He’ll come back. He always does.”

_ Present Day _

Tim summons Jason to the Edison Hotel in uptown Gotham with a cryptic text, containing only the address, room number, and a time. Jason ignores it, of course, chucking it onto the kitchen table in favor of the pot of  _ ropa vieja _ he’s working on.

Tim calls an hour later. Jason ignores that, too, but the call picks itself up and puts itself on speakerphone. “Why are you still at your safehouse?” 

Jason narrows a glare at the phone. “Babs taught you that trick, didn’t she?”

“Didn’t you get my message?”

“I did, but luckily for me, I’m not a trained dog.”

“It’s important, Jason.”

“Then I’m sure Bruce wouldn’t want me anywhere near it.”

“It’s about Dick.”

“Don’t you mean Ric?”

Tim makes a disgruntled noise. “I think we found a way to bring him back.”

Jason stills.  _ Manipulative bastard. _ “Who’s ‘we’?”

“Just come to the meet spot.”  _ Click. _

Jason snarls, venomous. God, he hates this fucking family.

Thirty minutes later, Jason is striding into the Edison’s glossy, turn-of-the-century-styled lobby, ignoring the receptionists and bellhops trying to help him and heading straight for the elevator. When he knocks on the door of suite 1302, Tim answers looking like he hasn’t slept in a week.

“You’re late.” He turns and strides back into the suite, leaving the door open.

Jason takes a moment to count back from ten before following.

What he doesn’t expect to find is Zatanna Zatara sitting cross-legged on the king-sized bed, dressed in jeans and a slouchy sweater instead of her usual magician’s ensemble. She looks up as he enters and smiles. “You must be Jason. It’s nice to meet you.”

“Uh…” Jason darts a glance at Tim, but he just sits at the desk at a laptop, expression betraying nothing. “Pleasure.”

“Thanks for coming on such short notice.” Zatanna swings herself off the bed and crosses the room. “If we’re going to bring him back, we’re going to have to start as soon as possible; his mind has already been broken too long—”

“Wait, wait.” Jason holds up a hand. “Would either of you like to tell me what the sweet fuck is going on?”

Tim sighs. He gestures at the bed. “You might want to sit. This is kind of a long story.”

Warily, Jason obliges. Zatanna purses her lips, but leans against the wall without protest. Tim turns to Jason. In the suite’s pleasant ambient lighting, the bags under his eyes are even more pronounced. 

“Right after Dick was first shot a few months ago, Barbara and Damian and I—we thought the amnesia was just temporary. Like, you know, we could snap him out of it if we just said the right trigger word or something. And then we realized that…that it wasn’t just amnesia. It was brain damage.” Tim swallows, jaw clenching. “And that Dick—the Dick we knew—was gone.”

Jason grimaces as he remembers his own words to Tim the night he met Ric. It was an asshole move, throwing something like that in the kid’s face, when he knew how much Dick meant to him.

“So, you know. We tried to move on. To get to know Dick as he is now—as Ric. But…he didn’t want anything to do with us. Or Nightwing. Or anything else from his past life. All he wanted was to be left alone.”

Jason watches Tim. “But…?”

Tim flinches. “But I couldn’t just  _ leave _ him like that. You’ve seen him. He’s not taking care of himself, he’s drinking and fighting—he doesn’t even have his own place.”

Jason tries not to think about Dick the last time he saw him, bony under his ill-fitting clothes and swallowing whiskey like water. “He took a bullet to the  _ head _ , Tim. You should be glad he’s even capable of spending his nights binge-drinking, instead of drooling into his nightie in a long-term care ward somewhere.”

“But that’s the thing,” Tim starts, urgent. “I know he looks different and acts different and goes by a different name, but we were wrong. He’s not gone, not completely. It’s still Dick, under there—or if not Dick, then  _ Nightwing _ . I’ve been keeping an eye on him, we all have, and he’s still got everything: The training, the languages, the instincts. He’s stopped muggings and assaults, he helped the BPD take down Scarecrow last month.”

Jason frowns. “I thought Nightwing hasn’t been seen in months.”

“Not as Nightwing,” Tim says. “Just as…himself. Whoever he is, right now—he still can’t stop himself from helping people.”

Jason swallows. If there’s one thing that would never change, it’s that. Dick Grayson, always needing to save the world. “And you think that means you can bring him back.”

“Not at first, no. Then I just…couldn’t leave it alone. But I knew I wasn’t going to get anywhere with just therapy or conventional medicine.”

“That’s when Tim reached out to me,” Zatanna says. “I wanted to help. I’ve known Dick a long time, and, well. Let’s just say the entire capes collective took it hard when we heard what happened to him. I figured a little magic couldn’t make things any worse than they already were. Tim got me close, and I took a little, uh, peek inside Dick’s head.”

Jason’s brows rocket upwards. Great: He loves a timely reminder for why he hates magic. “And how the fuck did you manage that?”

Tim winces. “Let’s just say that Ric is not quite as vigilant as Dick. Especially when he’s passed out in the back of a dive bar.”

Jason just shakes his head. “Well? What did you find?”

Zatanna sombers. “There was definitely a lot of damage. Most of his memories were still there, but it was like they had been…shattered. Like they were in pieces, floating in a void, instead of grounded into one cohesive narrative. With nothing to tie them together anymore—no identity, no sense of self.”

Jason looks away, jaw clenched. “Yeah,” he says, finally, when he can get his voice to work again. “That’s what I found, too.”

“It wasn’t anything that just time or some cognitive therapy could fix,” Zatanna agrees. “But seeing the damage laid out before me gave me some ideas. So Tim and I spent the last month researching in between missions, and…” She turns her hand up and unfurls her fingers to reveal a clay medallion in her palm, dusty and chipped with age. A simple sigil of a sun glints in lines of silver on its surface, with a large, glittering blue gemstone nestled in the center of the rays.

“I pulled some strings with John and got my hands on this,” Zatanna says. “It’s an ancient Egyptian sunstone amulet. The gem in the middle can store magic—or in this case, a spell.”

Jason eyes the amulet warily. “A spell to bring back Dick’s memories?”

Zatanna and Tim exchange a glance. “Not quite,” Zatanna sighs. “With Dick’s mind in the state it’s in…it’s not possible to just command the memories to return. They’re fragmented, adrift. They need a common thread to tie them together again and return them to their rightful narrative.” 

“Let me guess,” Jason says. “You’re going to build that thread.”

Zatanna looks pleased. “Very good. If we can plant a recurring—motif, or anchor, or whatever you want to call it throughout all of Dick’s most important memories, I can use those touchstones to reunite the fractured pieces into a whole again. To heal what the bullet shattered, irreparably, in Dick’s mind.”

“What do you need me for?”

Zatanna hesitates. It’s Tim who speaks up. “We can’t just…insert the motif into Dick’s mind,” he says, carefully, eyes never leaving Jason. “It has to be implanted, in the actual events of Dick’s memories. As they occurred in the past.”

Jason stares at them. “You’re not suggesting—?”

“The sun sigil is the motif that we’ll use,” Zatanna says, holding out the amulet. “And the spell in the gem…will bring you back through time, to some of the most pivotal moments in Dick’s life.”

The next thing Jason knows, he’s on his feet, as if his body is mounting its protest independent of his thoughts. “You’ve got to be shitting me. You want me to  _ time travel? _ ”

“Zatanna has already engineered the key periods of Dick’s life into the spell,” Tim says, as if that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to say. “All you would have to do is go where the amulet takes you and introduce the motif to Dick’s awareness without tipping him off. Low risk, low involvement. Think of it as an undercover mission.”

Jason bares his teeth at him. “If it’s so casual, then why don’t you go, replacement? I’d have thought you’d jump at the chance to be Dick Grayson’s knight in shining armor.”

Tim blinks impassively back at him. “I can’t,” he says. “Neither can Zatanna. Or most other people in the world, for that matter. There’s a reason why enchanters don’t use this spell all the time to go back into their lives and fix their past mistakes. Crossing back into your own timeline can have disastrous effects—paradox-sprouting, dimension-destroying effects. But you—when you died and then came back, you effectively bisected your existence into two separate timelines. You’re exempt from the paradox.”

Jason barks out an incredulous laugh. “Okay. Do you  _ hear _ yourself? You know that’s all gibberish, right?”

“It’s all true, Jason,” Zatanna says, rueful. “It’s long been in the spell’s history that only those who have been ‘resurrected from the grave of their past life’ can make use of it. So you can imagine it’s had a somewhat limited run. Until now.”

“No.” Jason shakes his head. “There has to be another way to do this other than fucking  _ traveling through time _ .”

“Believe it or not, this is the safest solution we could find,” Zatanna says.

Tim holds Jason’s gaze. “And the one most likely to work.”

Jason wants to say no. He wants to get up and walk out the door, back to the life where he was only beholden to himself, back to the life where Dick Grayson meant nothing to him. He stares at the amulet Zatanna is offering him and thinks about all the ways magic has fucked him over in the past, all the ways time travel could go horribly, catastrophically wrong.

Then he thinks of Dick, slouched at a bar with bruises under his eyes, looking at Jason like he’s a stranger.

“So,” Zatanna says. “Are you in?”


	2. Part II

_ Twenty Years Ago _

Traveling through time feels a lot like falling. Jason doesn’t know why he thought it would hurt; maybe he’s just come to expect pain. It doesn’t hurt, but it’s strange nonetheless. He feels weightless, untethered. Like for a moment, he has ceased to exist.

Then comes the jolt of landing after a high jump, his feet smacking hard against the ground and sending the force juddering up his knees. Jason takes a deep breath, sends out a quick prayer that he hasn’t been unintentionally shunted back to dinosaur times, and opens his eyes.

He’s standing on the edge of a vast, open field. The grass has been trampled down to mostly dirt and mud, but the ground is firm beneath him. A caravan of trucks and trailers has stopped in the middle of the empty space, and several dozen people are milling about, unloading equipment from the vehicles and trekking out towards the perimeter of the field. A team of five men are unloading what looks to be an enormous red and white striped canvas from the back of the biggest truck, and three other men are splitting off from the same truck with armfuls of wooden pegs. Beyond the far edge of the field, a familiar skyline is visible, a heartbeat line of skyscrapers rising against the clouds.

Before Jason can snag the nearest worker and ask for the time—and the day, and year—something small and compact bowls into his stomach with the speed and force of an unmanned aerial vehicle. He grunts and stumbles back, shielding his vital organs on instinct. Immediately, a bright, high voice fills the air. 

“Oop! Sorry, mister. Didn’t see ya there.”

Jason looks down. A tiny pipsqueak of a kid is beaming up at him as if nearly putting his body through Jason’s small intestine is the best thing he’s done all day. He bats the biggest, bluest eyes Jason has ever seen up at him and tilts his head. “Wait a sec.  _ You’re _ not one of our handymen.”

Jason blanches. “Uh—”

“Oh, duh!” The kid smacks himself on the forehead with shocking vigor. “I forgot. Mr. Haly said he was gonna hire extra people from the city to come help out, ‘cus it’s gonna be our biggest show yet.”

Jason feels his eyes widen. “‘Haly’?” he echoes, dumbly, and  _ oh _ —that’s why he felt like his heart was going to twist out of his chest the moment he laid eyes on this kid’s face— 

“My name’s Dickie,” the kid says, sticking out his hand. He smiles, pure sunlight in a tiny vessel. “Welcome to Haly’s Circus, the best place on earth!”

Jason stares. It’s Dick alright, but twenty years younger and two feet shorter and—downright fucking  _ chipper _ . His features haven’t quite yet developed into the essence of the Romantic ideal that Jason is used to, but the eyes and the lips and the toothy grin are the same, even with one of the front molars missing. “Nice to meet you, Dickie,” Jason says, past the knot in his throat; and then, because it’s rapidly becoming more and more difficult to keep his voice even, “I like your outfit.”

“Oh!” Dick smooths his palms down the front of his glittering red, green, and yellow leotard. The colors make Jason’s heart thump painfully in his chest. “Thanks! It’s new. I’m wearin’ it around so I can get used to it before I fly in it. I don’t want nothin’ to throw off my quadruple flip, ya know?”

Jason blinks, stunned. In his mind, he is suddenly thirteen years old, racing across the dark rooftops of Gotham after a bright slash of blue ahead of him.  _ What are you  _ wearing _ , ‘Wing? _ he remembers shouting, even as he fumbled to shoot a grapple at the right time to follow Dick over the alley.  _ Can you even move around in that thing? _

Dick’s laugh rang like bells through the night.  _ I’ve been doing quadruple flips since I was eight years old, Little Wing, _ he called back. His voice seemed to surround Jason even then, his presence larger than life.  _ Nothing can throw me off. _

“Dick!” A woman, young, with a pile of dark curls and eyes the exact shade of electric blue as Dick’s halts a few feet away, arms loaded with cables and harnesses. Jason nearly does a double-take when he looks at her: She’s  _ beautiful _ , striking against the dullness of the landscape. “What did I ask you to do?”

“Sorry, Mama!” Dick shouts back, not sounding sorry at all. He turns back to Jason. “It was nice meetin’ you, mister, but my daj and dat and me are puttin’ on a brand new act tomorrow, and my daj wanted me to ask Mr. Haly when we’re goin’ on so we know how to set up the trapeze. I gotta go now, but thanks for helpin’ us out.” 

Jason swallows. “You’re welcome, kid. It’s—it’s my pleasure.”

“Oh—I think you dropped this.” Dick stoops into a crouch and scoops something out of the grass—Zatanna’s amulet, which must have fallen out of Jason’s pocket when Dick bowled into him. He stands, tracing tiny fingers curiously around the medallion’s edge. “Wow. This is real pretty. I like the sun.”

“Thanks, kid.” Jason hesitates, remembering Zatanna’s words:  _ Plant the motif in Dick’s awareness _ . “It’s, um, good luck, you know. The sun. If you rub the stone in the middle, you’ll nail your performance tomorrow, guaranteed.”

Dick’s face lights up. “Cool!” He enthusiastically rubs his fingers over the gemstone before handing Jason back the amulet with a solemn nod. “I can feel it workin’ already.”

“Good.” Before Jason can think better of it, he reaches out and ruffles Dick’s hair. “Good luck tomorrow, buddy. You’re going to be amazing.”

“Thanks, mister.” Dick waves before scampering off, calling back over his shoulder, “I hope you get to see the show!”

Jason watches as Dick runs toward the edge of the field. A heavyset, graying man in his late fifties stands in the shade of one of the few trees on the land, deep in the middle of an argument with another man, younger, swathed in a dark trenchcoat and a fedora despite the balmy weather. Jason watches them for a moment, trying to decipher the feeling of foreboding creeping its way up his spine—before realizing with a sick jolt why the man seems so familiar.  _ Tony Zucco. _

Jason turns, abruptly, drawing in a harsh breath. It  _ hurts _ in a way he didn’t expect to see Dick like this: So young, so bright, so fucking  _ tiny _ , and so… _ happy. _ Genuinely, truly happy, without any responsibilities to weigh him down, without any darkness tainting the edges. After years at Batman’s side, Dick earned the reputation of being practically happy-go-lucky in comparison—but there was as much darkness in Dick as any of them. He only hid it better, and sometimes not even. Jason has often wondered what it would take to finally smooth out that crease between Dick’s brows, to know with absolute certainty that he could look into Dick’s eyes and not find him somewhere else. 

He knows the answer to that question now. If there was ever a carefree Dick with only light inside him, the way so many people seem to see him, it was before he watched his mother and father fall to their deaths before his eyes. 

It would be easy, to stride across the field and hold Zucco’s throat against a tree until he was scared off; easier still to reach inside his jacket, pull out his nine millimeter, and put one between Zucco’s eyes. But he knows he can’t, as completely as he knows that the world revolves around the sun. Still, it doesn’t stop him from closing his eyes and seeing Dick sitting at the edge of his bed, bare shoulders hunched in the moonlight, choking in breaths past the nightmare still clutching him by the throat; and it doesn’t stop him for wishing, however stupid and pointless it might be, for a different and better life for all of them, as different from the one they know as it might be.

_ Nineteen and a Half Years Ago _

When Jason opens his eyes again, the circus ground is gone. This time, he recognizes his surroundings immediately: He’s deep in the gardens of the Wayne estate, and the sprawling Gothic mansion looming over him is the household where his entire life changed. The air is damp and cold, but there’s no snow on the ground: A classic fall in Gotham.

There’s no one around, which doesn’t surprise him: As far as he knows, Alfred has been the estate’s only servant since the last remaining Wayne decided to dress up as a bat at night, and he prefers to reserve gardening for sunnier days. Still—Jason glances down at himself and grimaces. He’s not exactly inconspicuous in his Kevlar-lined leather jacket and combat boots. 

The gardening shed at the edge of the hedge maze catches Jason’s eye. He makes for it and slips inside before one of Bruce’s security cameras can catch him. Inside the little cottage, he draws what feels like his first breath in hours and takes a moment to steady himself. 

So he’s done it. He’s goddamn  _ time traveling _ —and through Dick Grayson’s personal timeline, no less. The entire thing feels like some sick joke played upon him for being stupid enough to let Dick into his life in the first place.  _ What were you saying about being done with the bats? _ the closest thing he has to a voice of reason asks in his head, snide.

But that’s how it always goes, isn’t it? Jason tries to leave, and Dick, always, pulls him back. 

Okay. He just has to treat this like it’s any other mission. What did Tim say—‘low risk, low involvement’? Ludicrous, but at least Jason has something to aspire to. He takes stock of his surroundings. What can he use to avoid being immediately being trawled in by Bruce’s security measures and called in to the Gotham PD as an overenthusiastic stalker? 

Jason emerges from the shed three minutes later in an olive-green jumpsuit. A floppy gardening hat hides most of his face, albeit at the cost of his dignity. He hoists a pair of gardening shears over his shoulder and looks around. Now all he has to do is find Dick and shove the amulet into his face without making it obvious he’s shoving an amulet into his face— 

Jason’s body reacts before he does, and he’s turned toward the source of the rustling before he even realizes he’s heard it. His smallest handgun that he usually keeps tucked into his belt is back in the shed with the rest of his gear, so he hoists the shears instead and tries to reign in his instinctual snarl. “Who’s there?”

There’s no more rustling, but there is sniffling, hiccupy and muffled, as if whoever’s making the noise is trying very hard not to.  _ Oh _ , Jason realizes. He lowers the shears, then, and braces himself. “Is somebody there?”

There’s a beat of silence, then another. Then, slowly, an elfin face peeks out from around the hedge, familiar now. “Sorry, sir,” Dick says, voice a little snotty. “I didn’t mean ta bother ya.” 

This Dick is just as small as the one Jason met at Haly’s, but the brightly colored performance clothes and serene, blinding smile are gone. His face is pale, almost ashen, and the bags under his eyes run so deep they look like bruises. Jason’s jaw clenches. It would be upsetting to see any child looking so haunted, but on Dick, it just feels…wrong.

“It’s alright,” Jason says, as gentle as he knows how to be. “You’re not bothering me. I was just…uh. Trimming this hedge.” He hefts the shears. Dick flinches so violently he nearly falls back into the rosebush behind him. 

Jason has heard stories, mostly from Alfred, about how…difficult…Dick’s transition to the manor was—after all, he was a child who witnessed his parents’ gruesome murders and then was forced to stay behind in an ancient, drafty mansion with a standoffish billionaire while his entire community moved on without him. But seeing it before his eyes in the form of an eight-year-old in a too-big wool coat, hyperaware of everything around him, sinks the realization into Jason with an unfamiliar, cold finality. He always thought of Dick, especially Dick in the Robin era, as the golden boy, Batman’s pride and joy, the pinnacle of crime-fighting goodness. But the truth is in front of his eyes, and the truth is far from that. The truth is an orphaned boy with post-traumatic stress disorder, wandering alone in a garden on the brink of winter.

Jason forces down a swallow and turns toward the hedge, sparing Dick from his direct gaze. He gazes at his canvas for a moment, considering. Then he begins to cut the shape of a circle into the hedge. “You’re the kid Br—Mr. Wayne’s taken in, right?” Dick nods, slowly. “What are you doing out here all by yourself?”

Dick’s brow furrows. Jason watches as he darts a glance toward the manor. “Mr. Wayne is real nice,” he says, slowly. Careful and contained as he watches what he believes to be Bruce’s employee. Eight years old, and already tailoring himself in the way he would one day become an expert in. “But he’s away a lot. The house can get kinda big and scary without him.”

Jason frowns. “He’s left you in there alone?’

“Well, Mr. Pennyworth is usually around, but he’s busy. And it’s…not the same as havin’ Mr. Wayne.” Dick’s eyes go distant. Jason recognizes the look instantly: It’s the same one that comes onto twenty-eight-year-old Dick’s face when his mind goes where no one else can follow. When he speaks again, his voice is flat and steady. “I don’t think he likes me much.”

Jason nearly drops the shears. “You don’t think Mr.  _ Wayne _ likes you much?”

“He’s never home,” Dick says, quietly. He picks a loose thread from his coat. “And even when he is, he’s always workin’, or sleepin’, or doin’ anything but bein’ around me.”

It occurs to Jason, in a sudden lightning stroke of shock, that Bruce can’t be older than twenty-five at this moment in time. The idea of a baby-faced Batman feels so wrong it could fracture the fabric of reality. “I’m sure he’s just, uh, busy with work—” 

“It’s not just that.” Dick barely sounds put out. In fact, his voice is curiously flat; like he’s simply making an observation. “He avoids me. He even spends more time with that grandfather clock in the hallway than me. I think—I think he regrets offerin’ to let me stay with him. Us circus folk are high maintenance, y’know. At least, that’s what the other kids at the group home said.”

Jason’s jaw clenches. Anger is always his first defense, and now is no different; it shields him from a different emotion, one he can’t quite look in the face. He has to take a moment to hide a calming breathing exercise under his oversized hat before he can speak again. “Those kids are bigots. Don’t let what they said get to you.”

Dick looks at him curiously, head tilted.  _ Right, _ Jason realizes belatedly.  _ Disaffected gardener. _ He clears his throat, turns away a little more, and begins working on carving a wavy ray sprouting outwards from the central circle of his design. “What I meant is, Mr. Wayne can definitely be—uh—difficult to get to know, but he’s…” He stalls, uncertain.  _ He’s…what? Controlling? Obsessive? But you’ll get used to it eventually?  _

Instinctively, he glances back at Dick. The kid is watching him, wide-eyed and expectant, as if he’s been sold on Jason’s wisdom so far and is willing to listen to whatever comes next. Usually it’s Dick coaxing Jason back to Bruce, offering himself up as the translator of Bruce’s terse missives, navigating the minefield of the Bat’s indecipherable psyche so that the rest of them don’t have to. The irony doesn’t escape him: The fate of Dick’s mind—of Dick’s  _ life _ —depends on Jason being able to conjure up a few convincing words on Bruce Wayne’s warmth and virtue.

For a moment, Jason wonders what would happen if he warns Dick off Bruce right now; if he somehow, through a single moment of committed and aggressive badmouthing, keeps Dick from ever falling into the labyrinthian consequences of Bruce’s crusade. Wouldn’t Dick be better off, if he was never Robin? If he never had to break himself against the rocks of self-sacrifice over and over again, in pursuit of an impossible peace? 

Without that precedent, would Bruce take Jason in? Would he and Dick even meet?

“He’s got good intentions.” The words come out as if pulled from Jason’s throat by force. They feel like they have been chipped out of somewhere deep inside him, true enough but difficult to relinquish. “Bruce is…a good man. You just have to get to know him.”

Dick is silent for long enough that Jason forgets he’s trying to hide his face and turns to look at him. The look he’s met with pierces him through: Knowing and wondering and accepting all at once. It’s a look Dick has given him dozens of times: When he lashes out after a nightmare at four o’clock in the morning; when he pulls Tim or Stephanie out of a mission gone bad and runs before either of them can thank him. It’s an unspoken question, a tired acceptance, a gesture so quintessentially and complicatedly  _ Dick _ that Jason thought he’d never see it again after said man took a bullet to the head. 

“You’ve known him for a long time, haven’t you?” Dick asks, and Jason flinches away, like the words have the ability to damage him if they get too close. It must be some sick joke of the universe, that even at age eight, a decade before they meet, Dick Grayson can still see straight through him. “You really seem to get him.”

Jason vacillates between the truth and a lie and settles on something in between. “I have known him for a long time, but I think there are very few people in this world that get him.” He puts the finishing touches on his horticultural masterpiece and steps back, surveying it for proportional accuracy. “He’s your guardian now, so I’d bet you’re going to be one of those people.” 

Dick stares at the sun motif Jason has carved into the hedge, brow furrowed in pensive reflection. At last, he nods, once, in determination. “You’re right. If he won’t get to know me, then  _ I’ll _ get to know  _ him. _ ” He unfurls himself and stands, proudly unaware of the small forest of sticks and leaves in his hair and the wool of his coat. “At least I’ll figure out what’s so special about that dumb old clock.”

Jason tilts him a nod. “Godspeed, kid.”

Dick grins up at him. It’s a shadow of the gap-toothed beam Jason received an hour in his past and six months in Dick’s, but it’s more familiar to him, more like the soft, curling smiles of the Dick Jason knows. “Thanks, mister,” he says; then he’s gone, hurrying back towards the manor, head bent against the bitter wind picking up across the grounds.

_ Eleven Years Ago _

Jason has barely changed out of the gardening jumpsuit and back into his own clothes before he’s standing in a seedy back alley somewhere, the sky dark and hazy above him. Judging by the plumes of steam bursting from the cracked pipes running along the walls and the smells of smoke and vomit thick in the air, he could be anywhere in Gotham. 

The back door to one of the buildings opens. A harried-looking woman emerges, lugging a garbage bag. She hefts it into the dumpster, then does a double-take at the sight of Jason. “ _ Christ _ , you scared me.” Her eyes narrow. “Are you the new bartender?”

“Uh.” The weight of the amulet is warm in Jason’s pocket. “Yes?”

The woman rolls her eyes. “You’re nearly a half hour late, you know that? Joel said you’d be here by ten. Come on, follow me.” 

Jason follows her into the building, through a bustling kitchen and into a storeroom. She tosses him an apron and nods out the other door. “Go on, then. And don’t be afraid to take keys. The regulars here aren’t known for their restraint.”

“Great,” Jason mutters. He hesitates before shrugging off his jacket and hanging it up on the wall. Then he ties the apron around his waist, makes sure the amulet is still tucked safely in his pocket, and ducks out the door.

The bar is more or less a typical Gotham joint: Poorly lit and more than a little seedy, but with enough revival architecture and draft beer to make up for it. The clock on the wall tells Jason it’s almost eleven, but the crowd is sparse, limited to mostly a few lone drinkers nursing pints at the counter and some blue collar workers playing pool in the back. Jason situates himself behind the counter across from a patron with his head down on his arms and picks up a glass and a rag to polish it, mostly just to have something to do while he scouts his surroundings.

Then the drunk lifts his head, and Jason nearly drops the glass. It’s Dick—not tiny and prepubescent with a sixties schoolboy haircut, but the Dick Jason knows, with cheekbones structured enough to rival high rises and a jawline that could cut glass. Well—almost. His face is still narrower than Jason is used to, his skin soft and smooth, and the unstyled spill of his hair is more genuinely messy than artfully ruffled. Knowing that Dick has always looked smaller than his age, Jason would place him around seventeen or eighteen—definitely too young to be at the bottom of a double of whiskey at a dive bar in lower Gotham.

“Hi,” Dick greets him. His voice is steady enough, but the heavy flutter of his eyelids tells Jason all he needs to know about Dick’s state of inebriation. “Could I get—um—another one of whatever this was?”

Jason pulls down the bottle of whiskey and pours out a fifth. He watches Dick down it in one swallow and grimace. “You look a little young to be hanging out in places like this.”

Dick lifts his eyebrows at him. “I’ve got ID, if you want to see it.”

Jason shakes his head. He’d bet that Dick has at least thirty over-21 IDs from various missions that would fool even the US government, never mind a bartender. “I’m good. I’ll assume that if you’re here, you’ve got a good reason to be.”

Jason turns, putting his back to the counter so he can give himself a moment to wonder frantically how he’s going to get the amulet’s motif in front of Dick this time. The amulet seems to grow even warmer in his pocket. Jason fishes it out and turns it over in his fingers. The clay is hot to the touch, as if it’s been sitting out in the sun.

“Could I get a beer, please?”

Jason glances over his shoulder. Dick is looking at him with his cheek propped on his fist, eyes blue and expectant. He sighs and reaches into the coolers under the counter. The bottle he pulls out stills him in his tracks. The label identifies it as Salty Dog IPA, but the design is of a simple runic sun on a pale blue background.

_ Oh, _ Jason thinks, before sliding it across the counter. Dick catches it and uncaps it, downing half of it at once before setting it back down with barely a grimace. He catches Jason watching him and flashes an appreciative grin. “I’m Dick.”

“Nice to meet you, Dick,” Jason says; then asks, before he can stop himself, “Who taught you to drink like that?” 

Dick tilts his head, the ghost of a smirk curving his lips. “My friends,” he replies. Jason takes that to mean the Titans. “Most of them are a little older than me—not that, uh, I’m not old enough myself.”

Jason rolls his eyes. “Right,” he drawls. “And what’s a young, of-age man like you doing drinking all by yourself?”

For a while, Dick is silent, and Jason thinks that maybe the conversation is already over. Then Dick grips the bottle tight, and says, too calm, “My foster father adopted another kid today.”

Jason freezes.  _ Oh, shit, _ he thinks; and then, when it hits him again in full force,  _ Oh,  _ shit. 

“Which, I know, doesn’t sound like something dramatic enough to drive me to drinking, but trust me, it is.” Dick barks out a laugh, tinged with bitterness. “He never adopted  _ me _ , and I lived with him for nine years. I’ve known him for longer than I knew my birth parents, and he’s never even brought it up.”

Jason remembers the day Bruce offered to adopt him, the memory uncorroded by death and resurrection and everything that followed. It was two weeks to the day after Jason’s father went back to prison. Bruce sat him down in the kitchen, Alfred surreptitiously wiping down the counters nearby, and offered Jason a packet of papers along with his usual post-patrol sandwich. “I want you to know that you can say no to this, if it’s not what you want,” Bruce began, as if he was already anticipating Jason turning him down; “and even if you say yes, nothing has to change between us. Wayne Manor is your home, for as long as you want it to be; and we are your family. I’d like to make that official. I’d like to adopt you, Jason. What do you think?”

It was the most perfect thing anyone had ever said to him. Perfect in every way.

“And he gave him R—” Dick swallows the rest of his sentence, abrupt enough to yank Jason back into the moment. He hiccups and shakes his head, forlorn and self-reproaching. His words have started to slur, proof that not even Bat-training can stand up against mixing whiskey and beer. “He gave the kid my things. And he didn’t even bother to tell me. That’s what really stings, y’know? I had to find out from Babs. Barbara. From a mutual friend.”

Jason swallows. He reaches for a dirty glass and the polishing rag again, just to give his hands something to do while his mind works overtime. “Did—did you want him to ask you? Your foster father?”

“No. Yes. I don’t know.” Dick picks at the label on his beer bottle, brow furrowed. “I don’t know if I would have said yes. But I wanted to be asked.”

For a moment Jason just watches Dick, taking him in. Roy told him, on one particularly slow mission, about how serious Dick Grayson was as a teenager, how jaded he was compared to the rest of their lot. “Actually, a bit of a buzzkill, sometimes,” he said, mouth quirking in that sort of reluctant fondness that’s had Jason wondering a dozen times what exactly Robin and Speedy were to each other. “But I guess that’s what leading life-or-death missions at the age of sixteen does to you. That, and spending puberty in the shadow of the bat. That’d fuck anyone up.”

When Jason was Robin, he only saw Dick Grayson as the perfect asshole who put all the other sidekicks to shame, the golden boy who could do no wrong. And then he came back, and he was so broken that Dick, the Bat’s chosen heir, seemed mockingly whole in comparison, whose own dark streak only seemed to make him even more of a hypocrite. But now he’s an adult, with his own team and operations and purpose, and Dick isn’t the untouchable idol, too high for him to reach and too good for him to tarnish. Dick is a teenager getting drunk alone in a bar—which makes  _ Jason _ the stable one. 

Which is an unsettling a realization as Jason’s ever had.

“Maybe this kid really needed it.”

Dick looks up. Jason keeps his eyes on his hands, his tone casual. “The one your foster dad adopted. There are a lot of kids like that on the street, you know—ones who need a family more than they need new clothes or money or even a place to stay. Ones who need a purpose, to feel like they have a place and a people to belong to. Maybe it was more for the kid’s sake, than your dad’s, that your dad offered to adopt him.” He clears his throat, sets the glass down, and picks up another one. “That’d be my guess, anyway.”

Dick blinks at him. He swallows, slowly, and wets his lips. “You’re…a lot wiser than the usual bartender.”

Jason barks out a laugh that’s mostly relief. “You a regular here?”

He receives an uncoordinated shrug in reply. “I…dip in…from time to time.”

“Uh huh.” Jason eyes Dick’s flushed cheeks and dilated pupils. He’s attended his fair share of Wayne galas, both as a runty teenager in awe at his first taste of the Gotham high life and a reformed black sheep giving out fake names to curious socialites, and he’s never actually seen either Bruce or Dick drunk. Sure, they’ll swig champagne with all the donors and stumble charmingly over their own feet, but the moment they’re no longer being watched, the facade slips back into the same steady watchfulness every time. Jason always assumed that either the two never drank, or they’d trained themselves into an alcoholic’s level of tolerance. Actually seeing Dick drunk—even if he is still barely more than a teenager—is strangely unnerving. “Just how many have you had tonight, kid?” 

“Counting this nice—uh—sunshine beer?” Dick’s brows furrow. “Um. Seven. No, eight. Seven and a half.”

“Right,” Jason says. “So you’re not going to remember much of this at all, are you?”

“I’m  _ fine _ ,” Dick insists, indignant. He gestures for emphasis and nearly knocks over his eighth drink. “I’ve got incredible tolerance. I’ve got tolerance for things you wouldn’t  _ believe _ .”

“Uh huh,” Jason says. He puts away the glass and the rag and finds himself propping his hands on his hips, because apparently being twenty-five while Dick is seventeen does that to him. “Is there someone I should be calling for you?”

Dick shakes his head. “No. I can get home fine by myself.” He slides off the barstool and immediately stumbles. Jason lunges for him, but he catches himself on the counter just in time and flashes a weak smile. “See? Razor sharp reflexes.”

Jason rolls his eyes and reaches for the phone on the wall. “I’m calling you a cab.”

The car comes, and Jason walks Dick out to the street, just in case. Jason catches the attention of the driver and turns to Dick. “Can I trust you to give your own address?”

“I’m  _ fine _ . Dry as the Sahara.” Dick opens the door of the cab and then glances back, grin crooked and bright. “Thanks, by the way. I’ll remember what you said. Promise.”

Jason swallows past the sudden knot in his throat. He thinks of being fourteen, of perfect Dick Grayson giving him the original, iconic Robin uniform, of feeling like he’d fallen into the orbit of a sun. “I’ll hold you to that, kid,” he says. Dick gives him one last wave and ducks into the car. Jason stands there and watches as it pulls away, and then a little while still, long after it’s gone.

_ Six Years Ago _

Jason retrieves his jacket from the storeroom and leaves out the same way he came in, only feeling a little bad for ditching his shift—only to realize, the moment his boots hit asphalt, that the alley he’s returned to is not the same one he left. He glances over his shoulder to find the bar’s back entrance gone, replaced by an unbroken brick wall. He considers the possibility that he probably should have asked Tim and Zatanna just how many stops were on this ride before getting on.

This alley is in considerably worse shape than the previous one, which doesn’t tell Jason much, except that he spends too much time in alleys. He doesn’t have time to do more than glance around before headlights flood the narrow space and a police patrol car rolls in from the street. Instinct takes over; a moment later Jason is crouched in the shadows of the nearest fire escape, domino on and lenses down. 

The car comes to a stop close enough that Jason doesn’t even have to turn on his mask’s night vision to make out the faces of the two young-ish beat cops inside. The one behind the wheel rolls his window down and hands his partner a cup of coffee. “Here’s to a quiet night, yeah?”

His partner snorts. “Sure,” he retorts. “You forget what city we’re in, Hawkins?”

Hawkins shrugs. “I dunno,” he says. “It’s been pretty quiet these past few weeks. Ever since Nightwing took Desmond out.” 

Jason straightens. He’s already guessed as much from the “BPD” stenciled on the side of the car, but the mention of golden boy’s alter ego confirms it: He’s in Bludhaven, Gotham’s nastier little sister down the coast. He knows it was Dick’s city for the majority of his Nightwing career, before the place was wrecked in an attack from Luthor’s band of freaks; but what he did there during that time is mostly a mystery. Which leads Jason to the question: Who is ‘Desmond’?”

“It’s the calm before the storm,” Not-Hawkins returns, taking a cynical sip of his coffee. “Desmond might have been a monster, but he ruled this place with an iron fist for years. Now that he’s dead, he’s left his throne empty; and wherever there’s an empty throne, there are ten times as many nasty sons of bitches lookin’ to fill it, mark my words.”

Jason’s brows hit his hairline.  _ ‘Dead’? _ Okay, now he  _ really _ has to find Dick.

He leaves Hawkins and Not-Hawkins to their coffee and doughnuts and climbs the rest of the way up the fire escape, onto the roof. The elevation increase gives him the height he needs to pick up a signal on the Bats’ infonetwork. He knows his login designation won’t work—whenever this is, it was long before his not-so-triumphant return to the family—but he does know Dick’s login, the side effect of being beside him during too many crack-of-dawn calls. And he knows the lines of code Tim taught him to override the privacy switches and access the live tracker feeds. A moment later, he has Nightwing’s location as of eleven minutes ago, four miles away by ground, two and a half by rooftop.

Jason remembers, vaguely, Dick mentioning once that he used to be able to see Gotham across the water from his apartment in Blddhaven. His GPS location now is nowhere near the Bay. Instead, Jason finds himself in the low-income district of the city, not quite gangland territory yet but far from any whiff of luxury. He follows the blinking blue dot on his gauntlet computer to the fourteenth floor of a shabby apartment building and climbs down from the roof onto the fire escape outside. 

It’s a little too easy to break the lock on the window. He climbs into an unlit living room, half-expecting an alarm to go off the second his boots hit the floor, but nothing happens. Even in the dark of night, he can tell that the apartment is a safehouse and not a home; but before he can do much more than note the minimal furniture and absence of any personal items, something bowls into him and forces him to the ground with enough momentum to knock the air from his lungs.

Something cracks, audibly, down by Jason’s leg. He gasps out a curse and rolls onto his back, but before he can reach for the bow knife strapped to the inside of his jacket, his attacker is on top of him again. The lights flood on. A haggard, wild-eyed Dick straddles his chest, knees pinning Jason’s arms down and a forearm held to Jason’s throat. Jason’s gaze falls past him and lands on the amulet on the floor. The clay medallion is broken cleanly into four jagged pieces, the gem the only thing left whole. 

“Who the fuck are you?” Dick spits.

_ Fuck, _ Jason thinks.


	3. Part III

Jason remembers that he has the domino on at the same time that Dick gets tired of waiting for an answer and presses his arm even harder into Jason’s throat. “I  _ asked _ you who you  _ are _ ,” he snarls. “And while you’re at it, why don’t you tell me what you’re doing in my house?”

“I’m a friend,” Jason grits out. It’s only then that he feels the warmth of something liquid seeping through the fabric of his shirt. For a second he wonders if Dick actually managed to cut him in their thirty-second tussle; then he realizes that the stain on his clothes transferred from the significantly larger one on Dick’s. “And I’m not here to kill you, so I’d appreciate it if you’d return the favor.”

Dick’s eyes narrow. “Why should I believe you?”

Jason drops his gaze pointedly to the bloodstain growing on Dick’s leg pant leg. “I don’t think you have much choice.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Dick returns, evenly. “I can do this all night.”

Jason gives it about thirty more seconds before Dick passes out from blood loss. He sighs and nods over Dick’s shoulder. “See that on the floor? It’ll explain everything.” He lets his jacket fall open, revealing the knife tucked into its sheath in the Kevlar lining and his empty waistband. “You can even take my weapon. As a show of good faith.” 

Dick looks unconvinced. After a moment of silent deliberation, he takes Jason’s knife and climbs to his feet. Jason can tell the exact moment Dick realizes his mistake by the way his face flushes ghost-white; then his eyelids flutter and he slumps sideways onto the floor, limp at Jason’s feet.

Jason sighs.  _ Twenty seconds, then. _ He steps over Dick’s prone form and scoops up the remains of the amulet.  _ God fucking damnit, _ he thinks, suddenly tired. Then he tucks away the broken pieces, compartmentalizes the fact that he is now stranded in the past along with them, and turns back to Dick, bleeding out on the floor.

“Alright, bird boy,” he murmurs. “You better have a med kit in this shithole.”

Dick is light in Jason’s arms as Jason hefts him up; it’s easy to carry him into the bedroom and set him down on the undressed mattress. The source of the bloodstain is a poorly wrapped bullet wound in Dick’s left leg, just above the knee. He finds a surgical kit under the cabinet of the bathroom sink, cuts Dick’s pants off, and cleans and repairs the surgical stitches that burst in the fight. Dick doesn’t so much as stir the entire time Jason patches him up, which is both convenient and concerning in equal measures. 

While Dick sleeps, Jason goes hunting. Besides the requisite vigilante tech and medical supplies, there’s little in the apartment, a half-eaten box of cereal in the cabinet and a bottle of whiskey in the fridge. Jason sighs, grabs the whiskey and a plastic cup he finds next to the cereal, and sits in one of the two chairs at the kitchen table. He pours out a drink for his past self, the one that agreed to Tim’s plan to go back in fucking time, and downs it in one swallow, just to drive home how much that guy screwed him over. 

“You’re still here.”

Jason looks up. Dick is standing in the entrance to the kitchen, looking drawn and hollow in nothing but a pair of boxers and the bandages wrapped around his leg. His gaze is wary as he takes Jason in, but the hostility from before is gone. Jason bares his teeth in a smile that is as flat and humorless as he feels. “I’ve heard it’s rude to run out the morning after.”

Dick’s hand hovers over his injury, almost protective. “You sewed me up.”

Jason waves the whiskey. “Consider this my recompense.”

Dick hesitates. Then he limps his way to the other side of the table and gingerly takes a seat. Jason watches as he curls up in the chair, grimacing the entire time. He doesn’t appear to be much older than when Jason met him at the bar, but the shiny veneer of youth has been stripped away: He’s still young, but in a fragile, breakable way, like so many of the kids Jason has met selling drugs to feed themselves on the streets of Gotham. It sends an unpleasant punch into Jason’s stomach, strong enough that his breath catches and he has to look away.

“So I guess I believe you when you say you’re not here to kill me,” Dick says, slowly, as much of a peace offering as Jason’s going to get. “But I still don’t know who you are. Or how you found me.”

“I’m…” Jason stalls. Somehow he doubts that he’ll be able to lie well enough to convince Dick. He’s never been able to before. “In the business. A fellow do-gooder, you could say.”

Dick’s brow wrinkles in skepticism. “Right,” he says. “You realize that’s, like,  _ the _ most suspicious thing you could say, right?”

Jason sighs. “Who I am and how I found you is…a long story. One that, honestly, I can’t really tell. But I can say that I don’t want anything from you.” He fishes the pieces of the amulet out of his pocket and lays them on the table. “I just need this fixed, and word on the street is that you might know how to get in touch with Zatanna Zatara.”

Dick stares at him. “You know my identity.”

Jason tilts a reluctant nod. “I know a lot of people’s identities.”

The screech of the chair being pushed back across the floor cuts through the quiet. Dick is on his feet and across the kitchen, the hunted, near-feral look back on his face. “I knew it,” he hisses. “You were one of his, weren’t you? That’s how you know who I am. I  _ knew _ he wouldn’t have kept it to himself, that would’ve been too easy—”

“Whoa, hey.” Jason lifts his hands. Dick is looking at him like he’s got horns growing out of his head. Jason has seen Dick furious at him, disgusted with him, concerned about him, guarded and cut off from him—but never like this. Never so…afraid. “One of whose? I’m not, by the way—I really run more of a solo operation these days—”

“ _ His _ ,” Dick spits out. “Blockbuster’s.”

Jason stops. He’s heard that name before. Tim mentioned it once, when Jason complained about “golden boy Grayson” never knowing how it feels to fail a case, and he couldn’t meet Jason’s eyes after; and he saw it in Bruce’s files, buried under three different layers of encryption and marked with a red flag. “Blockbuster,” he says, slowly. The pieces fall into place. “Is that—Roland Desmond?” 

“Get  _ out _ ,” Dick snarls, “and if you even  _ think _ about coming near any of my people, I’ll put you in a hole so deep and dark you’ll never—”

“Hey, hey!” Dick is shaking like a leaf, but the expression on his face tells Jason that he’s about a second away from charging head-on. “ _ Grayson _ . I told you I’m not here to hurt you. That wasn’t a lie. I don’t work for Blockbuster, alright? And anyone who uses someone’s family against them is a piece of shit, so you don’t have to worry about that from me.” He hesitates for a moment, then stands and begins removing every weapon on his person. The bow knife inside his jacket, the dagger in the hilt sewn into the thigh of his pants, the pocket knife in his right boot, the 9mm pistol tucked into the hidden holster at the small of his back. He pushes them all across the table. “Here. Every weapon I’ve got—it’s all yours. And I know we could both hurt each other just fine using nothing but our bare hands, but—”

“It’s okay.” Dick takes a breath, looking faintly embarrassed. He returns to the table, shoulders hunched. “Sorry—I just—”

Jason watches him, wary. “Desmond really did a number on you, didn’t he?”

Dick’s face hardens. “He was a crime lord who terrorized Bludhaven for years. It wasn’t about me.”

“Sure,” Jason agrees. “But some cases hit harder than others.”

Dick swallows and looks away. “It doesn’t matter. It’s over now.” He frowns. “You never told me your name.” He gestures to the mask. “Or your codename.”

“I…” Jason hesitates. “You can call me Bluejay.”

Dick looks surprised for a moment. “Bluejay. Good to meet you. You said you’re looking for Zatanna?” Jason nods. “She’s on tour in Atlantic City. I’ll give you a lift.”

Jason’s brows rise. “You’re coming with me?”

“I have a lead I need to check up on there.” Dick slants him a sharp look. “And while you’ve convinced me that you’re not going to kill me, I still don’t trust you enough to bring you to Zee without me there.”

“Fair enough,” Jason says.

Dick retreats into the bedroom and reemerges a minute later in a scruffy jeans, a t-shirt, an oversized corduroy jacket, and a single crutch, tucked under his left arm. Jason watches as he moves toward the door with car keys in hand, frowning. “That’s what you’re going in?”

Dick pauses and frowns down at his outfit. “I know it’s not exactly the edge of fashion, but—” 

“You’re not wearing your suit?”

Dick’s expression darkens. “I don’t do that anymore.”

Jason’s eyes narrow. “You don’t do what anymore?”

“Nightwing,” Dick says. He turns towards the door. “Come on. We should leave now if we want to make it there before her midnight show.”

~*~

Despite the leg injury, Dick still drives with the death defying speed and deftly avoided collisions of a man whose first car was a fully equipped tactical vehicle. Jason watches him out of the corner of his eye, cataloguing the hollow cheeks, the bruised eyes, the way Dick holds himself with his shoulders hunched inwards. He’s seen Dick exhausted and stressed before, but this seems different—like he’s seeing Dick in the aftermath of a shattering that he couldn’t put himself back together from. It makes Jason feel like there are ants crawling under his skin. Dick Grayson is meant to be the perfect one, invincible, only breakable when you take away his mind and his resolve and everything that makes him who he is. Not when he’s still got all four limbs, his memories, and backup on call across the bay.

About an hour into the ride, Dick sighs, loud. “Just ask,” he says, and Jason realizes he’s been sneaking glances nonstop since they reached the interstate. Jason bites down on a swear, annoyed with himself, and goes reaching for an explanation for why he can’t keep his gaze straight. 

“Your leg,” he settles on. “If you’re out of the game now, how’d you hurt it?”

“The gang wars, in Gotham,” Dick replies. “Before I hung up the suit. I got caught in a shootout with the police.”

“Is that why you quit?”

“No,” Dick says. “It was a long time coming. My injury was just the last nail in the coffin.”

Dick’s words only contribute to the suspicion sinking into the back of Jason’s mind.  _ It’s not possible, _ he thinks—but then the Bludhaven cops’ words come back to him, and he can only think of one thing that might be able to knock Dick Grayson and his solar system-sized hero complex out of the life— 

“Blockbuster,” Jason says, before he can stop himself. “Did you kill him?”

Silence fills the car. Dick’s entire body has gone rigid, jaw clenched and knuckles white. When he finally replies, his voice is rough and choked. “I might as well have.”

Dick sounds so tortured that it takes a moment for Jason to process his actual words. “But you didn’t.”

Dick grits his teeth. “I stood by and let him die. I might as well have killed him.”

Which means Dick didn’t kill anyone, but he blames himself regardless. In other words, absolutely nothing has changed. “I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it,” Jason says, low. The amount of self-control it takes not to remind Dick that he can lick Batman’s boot but he doesn’t have to deepthroat it is not insignificant. The task is made easier only by his recognition that it probably wouldn’t be very helpful in this moment. “There are better things to regret than letting scumbags face the consequences of their own actions.”

Dick’s hands tighten on the wheel. “You’re right,” he says, evenly; but he doesn’t meet Jason’s eyes again for the rest of the ride.

~*~

The Red Dahlia Resort is a technicolor castle of flashing lights and whirring graphics, the gem of the boardwalk and an eyesore for miles around. Dick parks the car and turns to Jason, deadly serious. “You don’t try to find Zatanna without me, understood? I’m not in the habit of setting my friends up to meet strangers who broke into my apartment alone. No matter how much said strangers profess they don’t want to kill me.”

Jason frowns at him. “Just how many strangers break into your apartment on a regular basis?”

The floor of the Red Dahlia is a cityscape of gambling machines and game tables, rising out of a sea of tuxedoes and evening dresses. Dick sticks out like a sore thumb hobbling along on his crutch in his jeans, and Jason in his domino, but no one looks at them, all too entrenched in their entertainment. “Come on,” Dick murmurs, keeping his head down against the security cameras staring at them from every angle. “I know a shortcut to the theater’s backstage without any—”

He comes to an abrupt stop, focus zeroing in on something across the room. Jason nearly walks into him before he catches himself in time. “Grayson,” he says, following Dick’s gaze. “What is it?”

“It’s my lead,” Dick says—and then he’s taking off, levying himself across the floor on his single crutch in pursuit of a figure in a dark cargo jacket with a heavy duffel bag moving along the wall on the other side of the casino. “Grayson!” Jason barks, but Dick is already gone, leaving him not much else to do besides growl out a curse and chase after him.

Jason expects Dick to get as close to his target as possible; what he doesn’t expect is for the target to slip down a hallway leading away from the casino floor and for Dick to follow, heedless of whatever might lay beyond it. Jason stares after him in disbelief. Dick has always been capable of infuriating recklessness, especially when others’ lives are at stake, but this is on another level. 

Halfway down the hallway, the target unlocks a door and disappears through it. The door, weighted, starts to swing shut; but before it can lock, Dick catches it. “Oh, you’ve got to be fucking  _ kidding _ me,” Jason hisses to himself as Dick slips into whatever lays beyond the door. Was twenty-two-year-old Dick always like this? And if so, how the fuck did he survive to twenty-eight?

Jason sighs, gets a grip on the knife he nicked back from the kitchen table before they left, and follows Dick through the door.

He finds himself face-to-face with half a dozen bewildered stares, not including the glare of the dealer standing over the table. Dick’s target stands beside one of the players at the table, a middle-aged man with salt-and-pepper hair and surprising gravitas for the Red Dahlia. Dick himself glances back at Jason over his shoulder. “Oh, good, you’re here,” he says, tightly. “Now we can start.”

“Excuse me,” the dealer begins hotly. “How did you get in here?”

Dick turns and flashes a bright, shiny smile, just crooked enough to be charming. “Dick Grayson,” he introduces himself. “I heard you boys might be playing some poker?”

“I’m sorry, sir, but I’ll have to ask you to return to the main floor, this is a private game—”

“Hold on.” Salt and Pepper leans forward, a look of interest on his jowly features. “Grayson, you say? As in Richard Grayson, Bruce Wayne’s boy?”

Bruce’s name sends a murmur of interest through the room. From where he’s standing behind Dick, Jason can see the tension that tightens his shoulders. His smile gains a little more teeth. “That’s me.”

Salt and Pepper grins, delighted. “Well, well, well. Come, sit. There’s room for one more at the table.”

Most of the other players are too intrigued by Dick’s trust fund baby, “I’m an easy target” shtick to do anything other than eagerly agree, but one man, younger than the others with a cliched Jersey slick-back, catches Jason in his suspicious glare. “If you’re Bruce Wayne’s kid,” he starts, “then who the fuck is that?”

Dick looks back at Jason. Jason glares at him.  _ We need to get the fuck out of here, Grayson. What the fuck are you doing? _

Dick turns back to the players and grins. “Oh, that’s just my bodyguard. You can call him Big Money.”

Jason closes his eyes. If his own lifestyle choices don’t kill Dick, Jason will do it himself.

Grease Slick sneers. “Your bodyguard is a  _ mask? _ ”

Dick shrugs. “Sure. It’s not like there’s any shortage of them around, and I ain’t taking any chances with the Joker right across the bay. Only the best for my money, right?”

The players nod and chuckle in agreement, and not even the walking hair gel advertisement seems to be able to argue with that. “Grayson,” Jason growls, low, as Dick moves toward the table.

“Take a seat, Big Money,” Dick drawls. “This won’t take long.”

Salt and Pepper makes room for Dick at the table next to him. He waits until Dick is situated before holding out a broad hand. “Nice to meetcha, crutches,” he says. “I’m Tommy. Tommy Tevis.”

Dick takes the hand, grinning. “Crutches. I like that.”

~*~

Quarter after one in the morning, and if Jason really were Dick’s bodyguard, he’d have his work cut out for him. The pile of his winnings has been growing steadily in the past hour, but his is the only one—and judging by the looks the other players have begun sending his way, they aren’t exactly gracious losers. Tevis is the only one who doesn’t seem put off with the amount of money he’s losing to Dick. Every time Dick presents a winning hand, the old man’s sly smile only grows, as if he’s seeing something he’s liking more and more.

Jason can’t shake the strangeness that’s settled on his skin. It’s not just that he’s playing bodyguard to Dick’s B-list celebrity persona in a room full of shady high-rollers; it’s not just that he’s essentially been thrown into the deep end of an undercover op with absolutely zero prep time. He’s been in the field with Dick more times than he can count, in far more dire situations with just as little preparation. 

In fact, it’s that familiarity that contributes now to the inexplicable, unpleasant twistiness he gets in his stomach whenever he looks at Dick, slouched at the table in his oversized jacket like a trust fund frat boy on vacation. It’s the dawning realization that the Dick Grayson Jason knows—the hyperprepared, overcompetent, always-strategizing, hero complex-ridden bastard more than capable of taking care of himself—isn’t here, and in his place is a twenty-two-year-old who leaps before he looks, relies on his charm a little too much, and can’t seem to shake the ghosts from his tail. Jason finds himself worried that this Dick is going to get himself killed before he ever has the chance to lose his memories—and then subsequently freaked out because if  _ Dick Grayson _ can’t take care of himself, then what chance in hell does Jason have? Jason the more anti-than-hero, Jason the second-best, Jason the replacement?

“Royal flush,” Dick announces, laying his hand out on the table and pulling Jason back into the moment—just in time to hear the cry of outrage that goes up around the room. Jason is on his feet in a second, but so is Grease Slick, features contorted in a snarl. “I knew it!” he shouts. “The bastard is fucking countin’ cards!”

“Calm down, Gene,” Tevis growls. “Don’t make a scene.”

“Listen to Tommy, Gene.” Dick leans in to drag in the pile of chips in the middle. “After all, you wouldn’t want to embarrass yourself just because you’re so bad with numbers that you think counting out a hand equates to counting cards, would you?”

The room explodes into chaos. Gene lunges across the table, scattering cards and chips everywhere. Jason lunges, in turn, for Dick—but Dick dodges his grasp and promptly snatches one of Gene’s outstretched arms, using his shoulder to throw the other into the ground. Gene’s buddies instantly make a grab for Dick, but even down to one leg, Dick evades them with ease. He takes one out with an elbow under the chin and the other with a kick to the ankle. The third jumps at him from behind, but he’s so focused on Dick that he doesn’t see Jason until Jason’s fist is colliding with his larynx. Dick looks at Jason, surprised, then grins while the goons roll at his feet in agony.

The dealer runs to the back of the room and slams his hand on a button on the wall. Instantly, two burly men in suits and earpieces burst into the room. The dealer draws himself up and trembles like he’s an eighteenth-century maiden and Dick has just insulted his virtue. “I’m afraid I must ask you to leave, Mr. Grayson. We do  _ not _ tolerate assault at the Red Dahlia.”

“Oh, come on now, David,” Tevis chuckles. “What’s a little tussle between friends?”

“No, it’s alright. I’ll leave.” Dick gathers his winnings and turns to Tevis. “Thanks for a good game, Tommy.”

Tevis tilts him a nod, eyes twinkling. “It was good playing with ya, Crutches.”

Dick lets the security escort him out of the room without any fuss. Jason trails behind them, keeping his eye on each of the guards. The guards lead them away from the main floor, towards what Jason assumes is a back entrance that they can toss Dick out of without drawing any unsavory attention from the other patrons. 

Dick lists behind a little, until he’s at Jason side. He slants Jason an appraising look. “Thanks,” he says, lowly. “For having my back back there.”

Jason grunts. “Just tell me you wouldn’t have gone into that room alone.”

Dick shrugs. “I did what I had to,” he says. “Now I’ve got an in.”

Before Jason can ask what  _ that _ means, a smooth voice interrupts them. “Clint! Chuck! Oh, thank god I found you.” Jason turns to see none other than Zatanna Zatara hurrying down the hallway—looking a decade younger with thick bangs cut across her forehead and dressed in a tailored magician’s uniform, but unmistakably her. She flashes security beefcakes 1 and 2 an apologetic smile, simperingly sweet. “There’s a patron out on the floor who is making  _ such _ a fuss; I think he lost a little bit of money and doesn’t seem to be taking it very well. Would you boys please show him out?”

Clint and Chuck glance at each other, then at Dick and Jason. “We’re s’posed to escort this one off the premises, Miss Zatara—”

“Oh, these good-looking gentlemen?” Zatanna bats her eyelashes. “I’m sure I can show them the way out.”

Clint hesitates, then nods. The three of them watch as he and Chuck take off down the hallway, hurrying back towards the casino floor.

Dick turns to grin at Zatanna. “I owe you one, Zee.”

Zatanna winks at him. “Add it to the list, Boy Wonder.” She glances them over. “So, what brings you to my humble venue in the clothes you wore to the grocery store this morning? And who’s your burly friend?”

“It’s a long story,” Dick sighs. “How about we take this somewhere a little more private?”

~*~

Zatanna lays the pieces of the amulet out on her vanity table, brow furrowed in thought as she traces her fingers around the jagged edges. She glances up at Jason with a sharpness in her eye, looking at him a little more closely now than when they first met. “Where did you say you got this again?”

“I didn’t,” Jason says. “It was a gift, from a friend. So I could carry out…an important mission.”

“Is it dangerous?” Dick asks. 

“In the wrong hands? Extremely.” Zatanna looks slowly between Jason and Dick, thoughtful. “But I don’t think it’s in the wrong hands.” 

“Can you fix it?” Jason asks. 

Zatanna ruminates for a moment. Then she nods, decisive. “I’ll look into it—ask around, bring it to a few people. Call me in a day or two.”

Jason sighs in relief. “Grayson’s not the only one who owes you one.”

“Sure, well.” Zatanna shrugs, watching him. “I have a feeling you’ll pay me back one day.”

Zatanna walks them out of her dressing room and to the casino’s employee entrance, only making a little fun of Dick’s crutch as they go. She gives Dick her current number at the door and kisses his cheek with a fond little smile. “Take care of yourself, alright?”

Dick grins at her, wan. “Always, Zee.”

Zatanna catches Jason’s arm before he goes. “Just tell me one thing,” she says, low, so that Dick, already out the door and walking across the lot, doesn’t hear. “Are you doing this for you, or for him?”

The question sends an unexpected punch of emotion into Jason’s gut. He glances out the door, to Dick’s silhouette in the moonlight—and thinks, irrevocably, of another Dick, in another time, blinking at him with slow blue eyes in the shadows of a dark room. He swallows, throat suddenly tight.

“For him,” he admits, because it’s just him and Zatanna here; because this isn’t really his life, and he doesn’t have to face the consequences of it being true. “Always for him.”

Zatanna nods, somber. “I’ll see what I can do,” she promises him. “Good luck.”

~*~

“So,” Dick says. It’s nearly three in the morning now, the highway back to Bludhaven a long, ghostly ribbon stretching out in front of them. Dick darts a glance at Jason. “You’ll be sticking around until Zee fixes your artifact, then?”

Jason grimaces. “Looks like it, yeah.”

“You got a place to stay?”

“I’ll find somewhere.”

Dick is quiet for a moment; then he says, quickly, “You could stay at mine, you know. If you wanted.”

Jason turns and stares at him. “You’re offering to let me stay with you?”

Dick shrugs. “Sure,” he says. “I mean. I still owe you for backing me up against those thugs back there, don’t I?”

Jason knows he should be glad that he doesn’t have the spend the next two days slumming it in the closest abandoned parking complex, but all he can feel is incredulity that Dick would invite someone he’s known for less than a day to stay with him. Then he thinks of Slade Wilson, and Midnighter, and all the other suspect characters that have circled Dick since his days as Robin and wonders: Is Dick drawn to every older, male, morally ambiguous figure that enters his life? Does Bruce know about this? Did  _ Jason _ know about this?

“Sure,” he says, finally. Younger Dick is an entirely different animal from the older, reckless and fragile and endearing in a way the older, with the responsibility of holding the entire family together, never allowed himself to be. As much as it unnerves him, Jason can’t find it in himself to walk away. “I don’t have anywhere better to be.”

~*~

Dick lets Jason have the bedroom while he “reviews some papers” on the couch. Jason is surprised at first that Dick would let him take his bedroom—until he looks around and realizes there’s little there besides soap, a toothbrush, and toothpaste in the bathroom and a single cardboard box of clothes in the closet. The Nightwing suit is nowhere to be found, not even the gauntlets. 

Jason catches a few hours of shut-eye with his back to the wall and the door in his sightline. By the time the sun is coming up again, he’s awake and ruminating at the opposite wall. 

He doesn’t know what he expected when it came to Dick in his early Nightwing days. Before Jason died, when he was still high on the magic of being Robin, Dick Grayson was The Original, The Best, The Gold Standard to always look up to. After he came back, Dick was just another hurdle in his mission to get revenge on Bruce, another self-righteous puppet of Bruce’s empty morality. 

But, since the start of Jason’s slow return to the family, Dick has been…something else. Something much harder to define than just the golden boy or the stooge in his way. Jason never knows where he stands with him. Never knows if Dick is hiding something stupid and self-sacrificing in his plans or if he just sees a strategy Jason doesn’t, if Dick is going to ignore Bruce’s commands or uphold his code to the letter. If he’s about to cut and run. 

This Dick is easier to read. He’s less self-aware about his own recklessness and the things he shares unconsciously through his body language, not as good as committing to a facade when he’s out of the mask. He’s fragile in a way Jason never saw Dick as—or maybe in a way Dick never let himself be seen.

Jason doesn’t know exactly how long it’s been since he began his journey into the past, but he’s beginning to feel the ache of exhaustion in his bones. He peels his domino off, washes the sweat and glue from his face, and then reapplies it before emerging from the bedroom into the kitchen. The rest of the apartment is quiet. For a moment he thinks Dick has stepped out. Then he sees the lump on the couch: Dick, tilted onto his side, head jammed awkwardly against an arm rest as he sleeps among a carnage of files. Jason’s neck hurts just looking at him. One thing, at least, hasn’t changed: Dick is still shit at taking care of himself.

Jason picks up one of the files, the thickest in the stack by Dick’s knee. He opens it to the cover page and finds himself staring down at a pale, sneering face, nightmarishly Cro-Magnon with its jutting brow and wild, colorless hair. The bio sheet identifies him as Roland Desmond, aka “Blockbuster”; 8’0’’ and 825 lbs (which,  _ jesus _ ); crime lord of Bludhaven. Status: Deceased. Jason glances down at Dick, at the furrow in his brow as he sleeps. Then he brings the file to the kitchen table, takes a seat, and begins to read.

The early part of the file is mostly research into Desmond’s criminal enterprises, the history of criminal violence in his family, how he gained his brute strength and size and the deal he made with a demon named Neron for his intellect. Then comes the reports, night after night of confrontations and new developments: His takeover of Angel Marin’s operations. Buying his way into the corrupt underbelly of Bludhaven’s justice system. His employment of a rotating gallery of rogues: Brutale, the Trigger Twins, Lady Vic, Tarantula. 

Dick notes the exposure of his identity with clinical briefness, nothing but the date and time followed by  _ Identity has been compromised. _ But after that, the attacks begin, Desmond targeting not Nightwing but Dick Grayson: Sending an assassin after Barbara, burning down Haly’s, leaving messages reminding Nightwing of his vulnerability everywhere he goes. The incidents culminate, finally, in the bombing of 1013 Parkthorne Avenue and the deaths of its fifty-four residents—

Jason doesn’t realize how tight he’s holding the file until the edge begins to rip in his hands. He sucks in a harsh breath and pushes it forcefully away, then sits for a moment with his fists clenched, forcing his breathing to calm. There’s an acidic anger in his chest, sharp and bitter; and he doesn’t know why, but there’s the taste of betrayal on his tongue, like the trail of a bad medicine.

There’s a flurry of movement from the couch. Dick has jerked awake and is clutching his phone. He stares at the screen for a moment, the color draining from his face. Then he jumps up, scattering papers everywhere, and grabs for his shoes and keys. 

“Dick,” Jason says, standing. Dick ignores him, pulling on his sneakers and running for the door. “Grayson!” 

“I gotta—I gotta go,” Dick blurts, throwing the door open. “You can stay or go or whatever you want—”

“ _ Grayson _ .” Jason catches him by the arm just before he makes it out of the apartment. “Where’s the fire?”

For a moment, Dick just looks at him, lost—then his jaw clenches and he pulls his arm from Jason’s grasp. “Bank robbery downtown,” he says, before running out of the apartment.

“Are you—” Jason lets loose a string of curses and dashes after him. “You’re going to show up to an active crime scene in  _ jeans? _ ”

Dick makes it to his car before Jason catches up to him. “Grayson!” he shouts, as he clambers into the passenger seat. “Just—will you hold on a second? You’re not even in your suit, for fuck’s sake.”

“Don’t have it anymore,” Dick shoots back, terse, which,  _ What the fuck? _

“Okay,” Jason says, slowly. “So then, uh, maybe you should just sit this one out, yeah?”

“Can’t.” Dick starts the car and pulls off the curb. He immediately hits sixty, and the speedometer needle only climbs higher as they race into downtown Bludhaven. “I need to be there.”

“Why?” Jason demands. “This is Bludhaven; banks get held up all the time. You can get the next one, when you’ve got your suit back, and maybe some backup—”

“I need to be at this one,” Dick grits out. He takes a corner sharp enough to throw Jason back and weaves down the avenue to a chorus of indignant honks. 

“Why? What’s so special about this one?”

“Los Arañas,” Dick says. His gaze is fixed on the road, but there’s a glazed look to his eye, a near-feverish flush high on his cheeks. “That’s the gang staging the robbery. They’ve already shot one cop and taken four hostages. They’ve been taking more desperate measures since they lost their leader—she was the one who reigned them in—”

“So they’re a particularly nasty bunch of would-be Scrooge McDucks. Let the police handle it this time.” Dick ignores him, only pressing harder on the gas pedal. Jason feels the annoyance in his chest threaten to turn into concern. “ _ Dick. _ You don’t have a suit, you don’t have a mask, you don’t even have your weapons. If you show up at that robbery, it’ll be as Dick Grayson, airheaded Wayne heir and nothing else. Best case scenario, you’ll be taken as a bonus fifth hostage for the robbers to score an extra allowance off the crisis negotiation team—worst case, they’ll make Swiss cheese out of you in minutes and  _ I’m _ going to have to be the one to explain to Bruce Wayne how I let his kid walk into the middle of a firefight—”

“I’m not his kid,” Dick snaps. Jason stares at him.

“But you are,” he says. He hesitates, wonders how much he should say as the masked man who broke into Dick’s apartment in the middle of the night and knew his identity. “You’ve been his ward for over a decade. He’s named you the heir of his family’s empire. I don’t know shit about your personal relationship, but I do know that you don’t leave someone everything unless you love them.”

Dick’s knuckles have turned white around the wheel, but he doesn’t argue, or reply. Jason switches tacks. “You said you’re not Nightwing anymore. This kind of thing isn’t your responsibility anymore. So why are you so desperate to catch this case? Is there something about it that—”

“It’s her gang!” Dick bursts out. He slams a hand against the wheel. “It’s her gang, and I put her away, and after what I let her do to me, I have to make sure that she can’t do anymore damage than she already has—” 

Dick abruptly cuts himself off. He takes in a deep, shuddering breath and finally releases his tread on the gas pedal. Jason tears his gaze away and glances out the window.

“There,” he says. “There’s parking by the Zip Mart.”

They pull off the road and into the parking lot of the Zip Mart, mostly empty at this time of day. As soon as he puts the car in park, Dick drops his face into his hand and spends what feels like an eternity struggling to even out his breathing. Jason sits and waits for him. He keeps his face and posture calm, but his palms burn where his nails dig into them.

At last, Dick lifts his face. “Sorry,” he says, short and clipped. “Won’t happen again.”

“Dick,” Jason starts, then stops. He doesn’t know what to do here. Whenever someone in their family has a breakdown, it’s always Dick who puts the pieces back together; especially with Bruce, he’s the only one who knows how. Jason doesn’t have that ability, to wield empathy with the dexterity one might wield a needle and thread. All he knows is that he feels like his chest is filled with razors. He takes a steadying breath and tries to sort out the tangle of his thoughts. “Who is she? And what, exactly, did you let her do to you?”

Dick stares out of the windshield. For a moment, Jason thinks he’s not going to answer. Then he says, voice flat and emotionless, “In this city, she’s known as Tarantula. I took her under my wing, for a while. Taught her what I could. But she didn’t want to do it my way. Los Arañas was her gang.” He pauses for a moment. “She was the one who killed Blockbuster.”

_ Shit. _ Jason swallows. “That’s not your responsibility. You might have been her mentor once, but her actions are her own.”

Dick shakes his head. “You don’t get it.”

“There’s nothing to get. She made the decision to kill. And even if you wanted him dead, that doesn’t mean—”

“I slept with her,” Dick says. Jason stops cold. Dick barks out a laugh, bitter and self-loathing. “Can you believe that? She killed a man in front of me, and I let her. And then I slept with her. Babs was right to get rid of me.”

And Jason—Jason can’t picture it. He can’t picture Dick Grayson, serial monogamist with a moral compass made of steel, falling into a casual romp in the sheets with a mentee, someone who had so violently gone against his wishes. And the way Dick says it, like he doesn’t know how he got here, like he doesn’t know how he let it happen— 

Something cold and insidious slips down Jason’s back, chilling him from the inside out. “Dick,” he says, slowly. “Tarantula slept with you—but did you…want her to?”

Dick’s gaze is empty and unseeing. It takes him minutes to reply, like he is a thousand miles away, sending the words back to his body. “I—I didn’t want it,” he mutters. “I told her I didn’t want it. But then she came to me and I didn’t stop her, I didn’t push her off—”

“Stop.” Jason’s jaw is clenched so tightly he can feel the ache in his skull.  _ Fuck, _ he thinks.  _ Fuck, shit, fuck. _

Did Tim know about this, when he sent Jason back? Was  _ this _ the pivotal moment that he wanted Jason to imprint on?

Jason pushes a breath out between his teeth. “Dick,” he grinds out. “You didn’t sleep with Tarantula. She  _ assaulted _ you.”

Dick flinches. “No,” he says. “No, it wasn’t like—”

“It was.” God, Jason wants to throw up. He can’t stop seeing Dick in his bed, panting and clawing, asking for  _ more, harder, it’s okay, you can hold me down, it doesn’t hurt _ —and how he would sometimes get a little distant after, like he wasn’t all quite there. “And you didn’t deserve it. No one deserves it, but you, shit—”

Dick shakes his head, but Jason can see it in his eyes that his denial is beginning to crumble. “We were involved before—we even dated, almost, for a while afterwards—”

Jason wants to shake him. How can Dick be so understanding and compassionate with other victims, but so blind when it comes to himself? “It doesn’t matter, Dick. She violated your consent, and that’s on her,  _ not _ you.” He takes Dick in, feeling an inexorable weight settle on his shoulders. “But you’re the one who has to live with it.”

Dick blinks at him, slow. “And how am I supposed to do that?” he asks, as flat and unemotional as if he were asking after the weather.

Jason swallows. “You stop blaming yourself,” he says. He thinks of the kids he knew growing up in the Narrows, Kori’s stories of enslavement—himself, almost, if Bruce hadn’t found him. His chest aches at the thought of the version of Dick that could’ve been: The golden boy, the favorite, untouched by failure or shame. But somehow he loves this Dick—hurt, healing, struggling and suffering and still throwing himself onto the front lines, always—just as much. “And you let people help you.”

Dick watches him for a moment, something in his expression that Jason can’t quite parse. Then he nods, once, and holds out the keys. “Drive me home?”

Jason exhales. “Sure, kid,” he says. “Always.”

~*~

They’ve just pulled up to the curb in front of Dick’s apartment when his phone rings. He takes the call, turning away from Jason. When he turns back, there’s a somber look on his face. “That was Zee. She says she found a way to fix your artifact.”

“Oh.” Jason kills the engine and stares down at the keys. “I guess I’ll be going then.”

“You don’t have to,” Dick blurts out. He flushes, high on his cheeks, but plows forward. “I mean. You could stay. Help me with this lead I’ve got on the Jersey mob.” 

Jason takes him in, slender face and wide eyes and all, and shakes the unease that’s been following him since his journey began off his shoulders. The Dick Graysons of the past aren’t bizarre, alternate versions of him, foreign in their flaws and fallacies; they’re him, through and through, essential to the Dick Jason knows. The Dick Jason finds himself missing so fiercely it aches, now that he can finally understand him. “Nah,” he says, softly. “Wish I could, kid, but I can’t. I’ve got people to get back to.”

“Right,” Dick says. “I guess you can’t tell me your name?”

Jason shakes his head. “Not today.”

“Will I ever see you again?”

And isn’t  _ that _ a loaded question. Jason can’t keep the ghost of a smirk off his face. “Sooner than you’d expect, I think.”

He pops the door and begins to duck out of the car, only for Dick’s hand on his arm to stop him. “Hey,” he says, quiet and so, so intent, and, fuck, Jason is staring to understand why men the likes of Slade Wilson and Midnighter are always so infatuated with him. “Thank you. I think you saved my life today.”

“Remember what I said,” Jason tells him. “And just—be kind to yourself, alright?”

Dick smiles, there and gone in an instant. “I’ll try.”

Jason nods. “Then I’ll see you around, kid.”

He steps out of the car and closes the door behind him. It hurts to walk away, like he’s leaving something precious and vulnerable behind. But Jason keeps walking. He has something to return to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> um, please ignore the unlikeliness of dick allowing some random mask who knows his secret identity to accompany him anywhere and just accept it as an artifact of dick's unstable state and also the author's frantic attempts to finish this fic before she loses all free time in her personal life :)


	4. Part IV

This time, when Jason holds the amulet, it feels different. Before, the amulet would grow warm whenever the spell worked, like a computer overheating. But the moment Zatanna hands it back to him, whole once more, it becomes ice-cold to the touch. Jason looks dubiously up at her as he turns it over in his hands. “How did you get this fixed again?”

“I brought it to…an old friend,” Zatanna says. She wrinkles her nose. “Do you know how to activate it? If it’s still not working, I can call him and—”

_ Present Day _

And then suddenly the dressing room at the Red Dahlia is gone, and Jason is standing in a hotel room instead; and in front of him is Zatanna, but without the outfit and the bangs, six years older again. 

Jason stumbles back. Zatanna reaches out for him, ready to catch him if he falls. “Jason. How do you feel?”

Jason looks around. He’s back in the hotel room where he met Tim and Zatanna—back in the present. “I—” He swallows, throat dry, and holds out the amulet. “I did what I could.”

“I know,” Zatanna says, kindly. Her eyes are far too understanding. “None of us could have done better.”

Jason blinks at her. The realization clicks into place in his brain. “That’s how you knew about this amulet,” he says. “You didn’t just hear about it through the grapevine. You remembered me.”

Zatanna’s mouth flickers in a smile. “I  _ knew _ you seemed familiar when you first came back from the dead, but it was such a vague and distant thing that I never connected the dots until Dick was shot and lost his memory. And then I knew what I had to do.”

Tim emerges from the bathroom then, hair sticking up in five different directions and face slightly red from being scrubbed. His eyes widen when they land on Jason. “You’re back.”

“Don’t look so disappointed, Timbers.” Jason tosses the amulet onto the bed and watches it bounce a few times before settling; Zatanna shoots him a wry look and goes to retrieve it. “How long was I gone?”

“Only a few hours.” In an instant, Tim is at his side, radiating anxious energy. “Did it work? Did you do it?”

“It worked. I don’t know what I did.” Jason scrubs a hand over his face. “Fuck, but it was weird, Tim. I saw Dick as a kid. I saw him as a  _ teenager _ . He wanted less to do with Bruce than I did.”

Surprise washes over Tim’s face; then his mouth curls a little, like he’s remembering. “I forgot you never saw him like that. They used to take me to see the Gotham Knights and sit on either side of me refusing to talk the entire time.”

“I met him when he was in Bludhaven,” Jason says. “There was a, uh, mishap. I spent more time there with him than I should have. I don’t know what it changed, if it changed anything.” Jason hesitates. “He was…fuck. I’ve never seen him like that before. He said he’d quit Nightwing.”

Tim’s expression fogs over. “You saw him after Blockbuster.”

“Tim,” Jason says, low. Zatanna glances over at them from where she’s throwing her things into a knapsack, but she gives them their privacy. “What happened to him the night Blockbuster died. With Tarantula. Did you know?”

Tim looks away, jaw clenched. “I always thought—” He cuts himself off and shakes his head. “I never could find any footage of that night. But I think I just didn’t want to know.”

Zatanna straightens. “We should get going,” she says. “If the plan worked and Dick has regained his memories—someone should be there for him.”

They pile into Jason’s car, and Tim navigates them towards the blip of Dick’s tracker on his radar. They pull into the lot of a skate park on the edge of the city. It’s dark out, past midnight, but there’s a group of people on the ramps, sharing bottles of liquor and cigarettes.

Tim hands Jason a pair of binoculars. Jason takes them and peers through the viewfinder at the loiterers. It takes him a moment, but he finds Dick among them—sitting against a ramp in a black hoodie and a gray beanie, talking to a girl with blue hair as he smokes a cigarette.

It takes Jason a moment to recognize the pit that’s formed in his stomach as disappointment. He shoves the binoculars back at Tim. “It didn’t work.”

“You don’t know that,” Tim says, but even Jason can tell he doesn’t believe it. 

“Unless Dick suddenly regained an adulthood’s worth of lost memories of his friends, family, and former mission in life and still decided to drink Fireball in a skate park with the ska fans of Bludhaven, I think it’s pretty much the only conclusion to draw, Drake.” 

In the backseat, Zatanna turns away, eyes glittering with disappointment. “When the amulet broke while you were in the past—it must have broken the spell, too. You’re lucky that at least it returned you to the present.”

“Yeah, that’s me. Lucky.” Jason keys the ignition and deliberately does not look back at Dick as he pulls out of the lot. His chest is so tight he thinks he might stop breathing altogether. “Okay. Time to get the fuck out of here, I think.”

“Shit,” Tim says; then, much louder, “ _ Shit! _ ” He slams his hand down on the dashboard, hard and furious. “Fuck. God fucking damnit. What the fuck do we do now?”

Zatanna reaches forward and presses a comforting hand to Tim’s shoulder. Her face is lined with grief, the sorrow of someone who has lost an old, old friend. “Now,” she says, quietly, “I think we go for a drink.”

~*~

Jason can’t sleep.

It’s been hours since he returned to his safehouse, stripped down to his underclothes, and collapsed face-first into his bed, looking forward to sleep as the only thing that could wipe his mind clean. But sleep never came, and instead Jason is lying tangled in his sheets, staring up at the ceiling as the hours slip by. He can’t stop thinking about Dick when he was still with the circus, so small and so fucking bright; and Dick as a teenager, so far from the idol Jason saw him as then, angry and fragile and so much  _ realer _ than how Jason knew him; and Dick alone in a city that didn’t give a shit about him, isolated from the only people that might know him well enough to help him. And all Jason wants to do now is talk to  _ his _ Dick: The frustrating, stubborn, beautiful asshole who somehow reeled him back into the fold of the Bats through sheer will and intimidation alone, the unfailing moral compass, the one they could all look up to—until they couldn’t anymore.

It feels like a cruel twist of fate, to know that he’s finally lost Dick forever, just when Jason began to truly know him. 

Jason has just managed to capture an elusive tendril of fitful sleep when the noise of someone banging on his front door jolts him back to consciousness. On instinct, he rolls to the side and lands in a crouch beside the bed, already arming the Sig Sauer he keeps under his pillow; but a moment later reality kicks in, and he realizes that the only people who would both know where his safehouse is and willingly throw away the element of surprise in coming after him are members of his family. His insane, infuriating, wouldn’t-recognize-a-boundary-if-it-kicked-them-in-the-face family.

Jason growls, stashes the gun in his waistband, and storms to the door. “Tim, I swear to god, if you think I’m in the mood to talk right now after what I just went through—” 

Dick stands on the other side of the door. His head jerks up as the door swings open, eyes wide and scared and so, so blue. The first thought Jason has is devoted to the bruise blackening on Dick’s cheek and the scrape half-healed on his temple. The second is nothing but blank shock.

Dick swallows, throat working. “Hi,” he says, finally, scratchy and rough. 

“I—” Jason hand clenches spasmodically around the door. He takes a quick breath, steadies himself. “It’s Ric, right?’

Dick nods, slowly, but it’s hesitant, like he isn’t entirely sure himself. “Jason,” he says, almost but not quite a question.

“That’s me,” Jason grits out. “How’d you find me?”

Dick’s brow furrows. “I, uh. I just knew how, I guess—to track you down, I mean. I started asking around, found your territory. Found someone who knew you. She gave me a few addresses you’d given her in case she ever needed a place to crash. This is the third one I’ve checked.”

The skate park, Jason realizes. He was so out of it that he didn’t recognize it as the same park where some of the kids he watched over in the Narrows liked to frequent. He can’t count the number of drug dealers he’s killed or otherwise warned away from that place. 

Dick’s gaze drops, flits up and down the hallway, then circles back to Jason, like he can’t quite keep his eyes away. “This is weird, isn’t it?”

Jason closes his eyes. Hours ago, Dick was looking at him like Jason was the only person he could trust in this world, and he didn’t even know Jason’s name. And now Jason is standing in front of him, bare-faced and vulnerable, and Dick is looking at him like he’s barely more than a stranger. “Just tell me what you want, Grayson.”

“I—” Dick swallows, hard, and steps closer. Jason flinches, but before he can take a step back, Dick is reaching up, ghosting his fingers along Jason’s cheekbone. “I don’t know what it is,” he says, hushed. “I couldn’t stop thinking about you after I left that bar. I don’t remember you. But I feel like I know you. Like I’ve known you my entire life.”

It’s as if Dick’s touch has sent an electric jolt down Jason’s nerves.  _ Holy fuck, _ he thinks, distantly, as he watches Dick stare up at him, taking him in.  _ Tim, you mad genius. _ He reaches up and curls his fingers around Dick’s own; and Dick lets him, their hands slotting perfectly together.

“Do you want to come in?” Jason asks. Dick blinks up at him. Jason realizes that his hand is shaking in Jason’s grip. 

He takes a breath and nods, once; and in that Jason sees the Dick he knows, broken and flawed but determined above all else. “Yeah,” Dick says, lips flickering into a smile. “Show me home.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ((please tell me what i was trying to accomplish with this fic because i sure don't know))
> 
> much of the Energy of this fic was inspired by this beautiful art by pentapus (pentapoda on tumblr) where she drew jason traveling back in time to right after his own death: https://pentapoda.tumblr.com/post/177005945230/pentapoda-jaydickweek-day-1-de-agingage. 
> 
> also, i DID start writing an outright happy ending, but the possibility of a little ambiguity was too good to pass up :)
> 
> tell me all your thoughts!!


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